Tag: Muslim

Tomorrow, President Trump is expected to sign an executive order enacting a 30-day suspension of all visas for nationals from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Foreigners from those seven nations have killed zero Americans in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil between 1975 and the end of 2015. Six Iranians, six Sudanese, two Somalis, two Iraqis, and one Yemini have been convicted of attempting or carrying out terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Zero Libyans or Syrians have been convicted of planning a terrorist attack on U.S. soil during that time period.

Many other foreigners have been convicted of terrorism-related offenses that did not include planning a terrorist attack on U.S. soil. One list released by Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) details 580 terror-related convictions since 9/11. This incomplete list probably influenced which countries are temporarily banned, and likely provided justification for another section of Trump’s executive order, which directs the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to release all information on foreign-born terrorists going forward, and requires additional DHS reports to study foreign-born terrorism.

I exhaustively evaluated Senator Sessions’ list of convictions based on publicly available data and discovered some startling details.

Muslim immigrant assimilation in the United States is proceeding well. American Muslims have either similar or greater socio-economic status and levels of education than the average American. They are also active in civil and political society. However, this is not the case in Europe where Muslim immigrants tend to have worse labor market outcomes, are less well educated, and less socially integrated. The lack of assimilation and integration in Europe is affected by policies regarding multiculturalism, welfare, labor market regulation, citizenship, and guest worker laws that make integration more costly.

Integration in Europe

Social opinions show how Muslims in Europe are less integrated than in the United States. In Europe, there is a wide gap between Muslim and non-Muslim acceptance of homosexuality (Figure 1) and abortion (Figure 2) according to three surveys published in 2007and2009. The acceptance gap on these issues is the smallest in the United States – meaning that Muslims in the United States have opinions that are closer to the general public than in European countries (Figure 3).

Figure 1

Is Homosexuality Morally Acceptable?

Sources: Pew and Gallup.

Figure 2

Is Abortion Morally Acceptable?

Sources: Pew and Gallup.

Figure 3

Acceptance Gap

Sources: Pew and Gallup.

Opinions on social issues are just one aspect of this gap in assimilation but an important one for judging how assimilated immigrants are into Western culture. Although there are many other areas that could be compared, opinions of abortion and homosexuality show that Muslim Europeans are less well-assimilated than Muslims in the United States.

This is a follow-up to my post yesterday about Muslim American assimilation that focuses on religious differences between Muslims in the United States, between them and their co-religionists in their countries of origin, and their differences with other Americans.

There are many different sects of Islam and most are represented in the United States. Sunni Islam is the largest followed by Shia Islam at roughly 89 percent and 11 percent, respectively, which is similar to the global division. African American membership in the Nation of Islam adds another wrinkle. There are further sub-sects such as the Sufi, Druze, Ahmadiyya, Alevism, and others that disagree on virtually everything from doctrine to modes of practice. In addition to those differences, there are five main schools of Islamic jurisprudence (four Sunni and one Shia) that reveal further differences to say nothing of how local cultures have altered practice and doctrine. Islam is not a monolithic and uniform religion. It is highly fractured and lacks a central religious authority.

Based on a 100 point index pooling the responses from religious questions in the World Values Survey, Muslim immigrants in the West had a religiosity of 76 compared to 83 in their countries of origin and 60 in their destination societies. According to Gallup, 80 percent of Muslim Americans say that religion plays a key role in life, which is more than the 65 percent of the general population but still less than the 85 percent reported by Mormons who agree with that statement. Those figures are slightly lower for younger Muslim and non-Muslim respondents aged 18 to 29. Pew also found that religion is about as important to U.S. Muslims as it is to Christians while both valued it more than the general population.

Gallup and Pew found that compared to Muslims in Islamic countries, U.S. Muslims are the least likely to say religion is important to them. Gallup found that Muslim weekly attendance at religious services in the United States is only just above that of the general population, 41 percent to 34 percent, and is 22 percentage points below Mormon attendance. Among Muslims who said that “religion is important,” only 49 percent attend religious services once a week – lower than the U.S. general population and all other religious groups except Judaism. For respondents aged 18 to 29, 41 percent of Muslims attend mosque at least once a week, the same percentage as Protestants, 27 points behind Mormons, and 14 points ahead of the general population. Pew found that weekly attendance for Muslims and Christians was about the same and both were higher than the general population.

Many Americans, including Donald Trump, are concerned over whether Muslim immigrants and their descendants are assimilating into American society. This topic is tricky for a few reasons. First, almost all Muslims who are immigrants or descended from them entered the United States after 1968 so there haven’t been many generations yet. As a result, the evidence and research on Muslim assimilation are not as complete as they should be. A second problem is that many studies or surveys do not compare the opinions of Muslims with society at large or other minorities. Where possible, such comparisons will be made below. A third problem is that, until recently, sociologists weren’t interested in Muslim assimilation in the United States. Whereas there is a vast literature on Hispanic assimilation going back generations, Muslims were overlooked entirely prior to the 1990s.

To mix my personal experience with this post, my brother and I are two of a handful of third-generation descendants of Muslim immigrants. Our paternal grandparents came from Iran in the late-1940s while our maternal grandparents were the descendants of Europeans. Nobody on that side of the family identifies as a Muslim anymore let alone practices, as far as I know, and none of those who were born Muslim raised their children as such.

My wife and her family have a similar experience although her father was born a Muslim and immigrated here in the 1970s. The extended portions of my family and my wife’s family mostly immigrated after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Thus, I am deeply interested in this topic for personal as well as professional reasons.

Muslim Demographics

The United States government does not ask Americans or immigrants about their religious beliefs, with the exception of refugees. Thus, we have to rely on private surveys and other methods of estimating the Muslim population in the United States. Many of these surveys do not distinguish between different sects of Islam but merely on self-identification. Thus, a Sunni Muslim immigrant from Saudi Arabia is just as Muslim as an African-American convert to the Nation of Islam.

A 2015 Pew Research Center report estimated that there are roughly 3.3 million Muslims in the United States equal to just over 1 percent of the population – up from Pew’s estimates of about 2.4 million in 2007 and 2.6 million in 2010. The U.S. Religion Census (not be confused with the U.S. Census Bureau) in 2010 found that there were 2.6 million Muslims, equal to about 0.84 percent of the U.S. population.

Seven of the most methodologically sound estimates of the size of the Muslim population around the turn of the Millennium found there to be between 1.5 million and 3.4 million Muslims in the United States. Five of those seven estimates found that there were between 2.3 and 2.9 million Muslims. Compared to the more recent estimates by Pew and the U.S. Religion Census above, the Muslim population has grown slowly.

Births and immigration are the main sources of growth for the Muslim population. Pew in 2011 estimated the total fertility rate (TFR) of Muslim women in the United States to be 2.5 children per woman and just 2.2 for Muslim women born here – both above the U.S. TFR of 1.9 in 2011. Roughly 5 percent of the stock of immigrants in the United States is Muslim. One Pew paper estimates that 80,000 to 90,000 immigrants a year are Muslim while another found 115,000 a year in 2009. Pew estimates that there will be 6.2 million American Muslims by 2030 that comprise 1.7 percent of the population.